Research Activities

Activity Group1

Panel Session and Paper Presentation at ICAS8, Macau.

Activity Group1

2013/07/11

The Eighth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS8)

Date: 24-27 June, 2013

Vanue: The Venetian Macau Hotel Resort

Research members of Group 1 attended the Eighth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS8) held on 24-27 June at Macau, P.R.C. At ICAS8, we set one panel session on migration governance and also made one individual paper presentation by Dr. Eriko Aoki.

The panel session focused on governance and management of international migration from the sending countries perspectives. Dr. Aysun Uyar examined the current international migration regimes and questions as well as their practical implementation, especially the Mode IV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATS). Dr. Uyar then discussed the human security implications of these regimes in the sending country. Dr. Maria Reinaruth Carlos’ presentation explored the trends in nurse migration from the Philippines and their stepwise migration patterns taken to reach the better destinations. Dr. Carlos also looked at the implications of such behaviours for the retention of Filipino nurses in Japan under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement. Shincha Park then examined the case of Korea arguing that a set of policies of granting partial citizenship to overseas Koreans to help “return to the ancestral homeland” was in actuality an attempt to introduce intra-ethnic discrimination in order to utilize a transnational ethnic network for the country’s economic interest. When a sending country fails to deal with increasingly restrictive migration policies in the host countries, migrants themselves create “personal” strategies to improve their welfare. Such is the case presented by Dr. Viktoriya Kim about women from the former USSR countries, who resort to fictitious marriage in order to circumvent Japan’s labor migration policies towards foreign women entertainers. Finally, Dr. Habibul Khondker looks into the governance of labor migration in Bangladesh and explores both the political economy and the cultural factors influencing the institutional aspects of its governance. He argues that specificities of the democratic politics in Bangladesh play a significant role in the rethink and re-conceptualization of governance in this country.

In an individual paper session, Dr. Aoki discussed about how the people in Flores, East Indonesia, have interwoven the ancestors’ ways and the Catholicism in the everyday life influenced by the nation-state and the global market economy. With such an analysis, Dr. Aoki also tried to explore a theoretical framework to approach religion itself.